The AI industry, corporate censorship & the destruction of knowledge: "But with all the world’s literature as its training data, why do LLMs seem to default so often to the lighthouse? It comes down to how model makers try to safety-align and sanitize their outputs." www.404me…
Who's Who of AI
Teresa Heffernan
Why they matter
Critic with public evidence across Models & releases, Agents & robotics.
- AI signals
- 9 past 30d
- Sources
- 9 distinct domains
- Discussions
- 23 past 30d
- Latest signal
- 3d ago
Literature prof; author; current project: how literal readings of fiction by the tech industry are destroying the world. Let's read/interpret fiction as fiction. Boycott generative AI (chatbots etc); Website: https://www.socialrobotfutures.com/
What they're sharing
Chatbots Keep Telling Stories About Lighthouse Keeper 'Elias Thorne'. We Might Know Why 404media.co
The Tokenpocalypse Is Here: Companies Are Scrambling To Stop Spending So Much on AI 404media.co
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I’m a Professional Fact-Checker. AI Is Wrong More Often Than You Think | WIRED wired.com
Is AI Profitable Yet? isaiprofitable.com
Majority of US’s new AI datacenters to be built on drought-hit land theguardian.com
reuters.com
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Teachers need help with AI. A union is offering training – with $23m in funding from big tech theguardian.com
Tokenminimizing: Meta Moves to Curb Employee AI Usage as AI Costs Reach Billions theinformation.com
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Big Tech is spending trillions on AI. Investors now want proof it will pay off. cbsnews.com
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bloodinthemachine.com
Anthropic CEO Doesn’t Know If Claude Used in Iran School Strike bloomberg.com
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‘Scary’: how misinformation and AI hallucinations are infiltrating Australia’s parliament theguardian.com
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Articles & links
Teresa Heffernan reposted
Leaked audio from Accenture says a big source of AI token ‘chewing’ is people just converting PDFs to presentation slides. They're not the only company now telling staff to slow down on AI use @evystadium.bsky.social has more. Read @josephcox.bsky.social story here: www.404med…
Disinformation machines: "A March 2025 study from the Tow Center for Digital Journalism found that more than 60 percent of responses from AI-powered search engines were inaccurate. A BBC study puts the wrongness of chatbots closer to 45 percent" www.wired.com/story/fact-c...?
Teresa Heffernan reposted
Now we can keep track of the money being sunk into AI rather than climate change, healthcare, or education. isaiprofitable.com
AI Weekly's analysis
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- The AI industry has spent roughly $1.4 trillion against $613 billion in revenue, leaving almost every major player still in the red.
- Amazon leads all spenders at $313 billion invested; NVIDIA is the sole major AI player currently in the black, profiting from hardware.
- The site's anonymous creator predicts clarity on AI viability by 2030 and notes Anthropic recently approached its first profitable quarter.
Read full analysis →
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"AI" is not the future: "Worldwide, three-quarters of people could face drought impacts by 2050 all while datacenters use 9.3tn liters of water in the coming decade, enough to meet the drinking water needs of the planet’s human population for over year" www.theguardian.com/us-…
Teresa Heffernan reposted
"Norway is imposing a near ban on the use of generative AI tools by elementary school pupils while also restricting their use in the education of older children to prevent a negative impact on learning" Sometimes, good policymaking is incredibly simple. www.reuters.com/techn…
Teresa Heffernan reposted
✅Flood the zone with your cheating product/shove it down everyone’s throats without consent ✅Get people/students addicted to it, so that, yes, they do “use” it (but it’s really using them) ✅Tell teachers, “see it’s everywhere & here to stay!” ✅Offer and fund “trainings” meant …
AI Weekly's analysis
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- The AFT's National Academy for AI Instruction is backed by $23 million: $12.5m from Microsoft over five years, $10m from OpenAI, and $500,000 from Anthropic in year one.
- The academy aims to reach roughly 400,000 K-12 educators by 2030, about one in ten US teachers, starting with New York City this fall.
- AFT president Randi Weingarten frames the goal as putting teachers 'in the driver's seat' with 'commonsense guardrails' on classroom AI.
Read full analysis →
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Teresa Heffernan reposted
The Information reports that Meta is planning to curb its employees' AI spending mere weeks after encouraging them to token-maxx. Meta is on track to spend billions on internal use alone. Anthropic and OpenAI cannot afford for their customers to slow down. www.theinformation.c…
Teresa Heffernan reposted
Zuck pissed away all of Meta's free cash-flow, and sunk it into a bottomless pit of debt to produce a substandard product that no one wants, at the expense of the company's only profitable lines of business: www.cbsnews.com/news/ai-bubb... 29/
www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/how-anthro...
Teresa Heffernan reposted
Let’s check in on the “ethical” ai company….
Teresa Heffernan reposted
this description of people choosing to use high speed plagiarising > enshittifying > uploading black box slop for submissions intended to influence public policy applies everywhere else it is used too. www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...
Their own posts
Recent commentary
Can the NYT's please stop confusing fiction with science? "I thought A.I. systems would grow more virtuous as they became smarter....even if one model in a group behaved badly" (Kevin Roose) Billions of mathematical calculations do not grow "smarter" "more virtuous" or "behave badly."
The AI industry, subject to little regulation, has made billions by promising a forever-coming mythical “superintelligence”; its products crucially involve overhauling & locking us into a global infrastructure, perfecting the model of marketing the idea of individual freedom while shutting it down.
I really wish journalists & politicians would stop going to the heads of the AI industry for explanations of the tech. It's like coke execs, peddling their wares, who tell you "coke is the real thing" rather than carbonated water mixed with corn syrup.
Finishing a paper on Neom & waiting for governments to catch up, so they stop investing tax payers' $ in the fictions marketed by the AI industry: "Rather than unveiling a new world, it is the last gasp of a model that has no future, best exemplified by the failure of the Saudi Vision 2030 project."
"The enormous amount of time and effort expended on technical and policy fixes to address the problem of fakes, scams, biases, misinformation, and disinformation are bound to fail if they never address the heart of the problem, the Orwellian language that pervades the AI industry."
Just to be clear: "Automation, surveillance, the degradation of labour, the destruction of the environment, and the upward transfer of wealth--not intelligence--are the backbone of the resource-intensive AI industry."
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